Faced with mounting costs and tighter budgets,
administrators of prisons across America are cutting back on chaplains.

"At many prisons, when things get tight, chaplains
are the first thing to go," said Bryn Carlson, vice-president of the
American Correctional Chaplains Association (ACCA).

"We’re in a code-yellow situation, and it’s going
into the red zone."

Carlson knows what he is talking about. In his home of
Georgia, the state let go all its chaplains, then rehired most of them on a
contract basis, which means chaplains now work without the job security or
benefits of full-time employment.

But Georgia is not the only state where chaplains are
being cut. Consider:

In 1991, the Dallas County (Tex.) jails cut all
chaplain positions. Now the county’s 6,000 prisoners have no full-time
paid chaplains, says Barbara Hart Siekman, who served at the Dallas jails as
a chaplain for 19 years and is the immediate past-president of the ACCA,
which has 450 member chaplains,

And in California and New York, there have been big
cuts in the number of chaplains serving juvenile offenders—a group of
prisoners very likely to benefit from the potentially life-changing work
chaplains do.

Charles Grimm is regional director of the New York State
Division for Youth, which is responsible for about 2,000 New York youths 16
years old and younger who have gotten into serious legal, criminal, or other
trouble.

Grimm, a United Methodist chaplain, served as a
chaplain from 1971 to 1991, when he was laid off along with all of the state’s
other youth chaplains. The layoff was designed to save money and get volunteers
involved.

Grimm and two others were eventually hired to supervise
the volunteer. He and the two other regional representatives are now responsible
for supervising volunteers at about five facilities each.

Grimm frankly laments that "there has never really
been any real concern about youth, in terms of supplying paid chaplains in the
facilities throughout the state.

"These kids who are in trouble, they are the ones
that the community has not been able to integrate. The community agencies have
failed with these kids. The judges throw up their hands and say, 'There’s
nothing we can do.'"

The cuts worry prisoners as well as chaplains. Larry
Perkins, who is serving a term for beating and robbing a passenger in his taxi,
says the disappearance of Chaplain Allen Davis at the Skyline Correctional
Facility in southern Colorado has hurt Perkins's spiritual development.

"Allen Davis treated you as a man, not as an
inmate," says Perkins, who was imprisoned once before as a prisoner of war
in Vietnam. "When he’s not around, I hold everything in."

Some administrators are also concerned about cutting
chaplaincy budgets.

"I’m not even a very religious person, but I
believe very strongly that the chaplain program is very important to our
facilities," says warden R. Mark McGoff of the Colorado Women’s
Correctional Facility. "Chaplains help prisoners sort out a lot of things
about themselves in a practical way, and no other program inside the prison does
that in a broad way."

McGoff and others say that part of the reason for cuts in
chaplains is chaplains’ own poor communication about their impact. Admits the
ACCA’s Carlson, "We have not done a very good job of selling our
story."

For instance, many know that chaplains officiate at prison
religious events and pray with prisoners. But they also notify prisoners of
deaths or crises in their immediate families, and they help prepare prisoners
for their transition back into everyday life.

Carlson says chaplains get failing grades for public
relations. Few chaplains make a point of impressing administrators for
politicians with the importance of what they do.

Footnote:

Since this article was written in 1993, the Colorado
Department of Corrections has now fired all of its professional correctional
chaplains, as have a few other state systems. In several other states,
chaplaincy staffs have been reduced and/or chaplains have been moved from
full-time positions to contract positions (thereby reducing their job security
and benefits).